An Epistemic Platform? YouTube and the Heuristic Montage

YouTube is often used as a reservoir of amateur footage for the constitution of research corpuses. Once constituted thanks to an extraction of videos from the platform, these corpuses are archived and submitted to different heuristic, hermeneutic and epistemic editing operations. Research is thus generally conducted outside the platform or “in spite of” the algorithms that determine its use. Starting from the method of “reasoned wandering” (Riboni 2016) that I applied in my recent research on the videos of Yellow Vests protests, my paper aims at taking a step backwards to identify how the platform itself can be considered as an epistemic device insofar as it always performs editing operations. Rather than reflecting on what kind of epistemic practices the platform hinders and how to bypass its algorithmic selection processes, I will thus try circumscribe to what extent we can consider it as an epistemic media, not from the point of view of the individual user feeding the machine with data that enables its function (Fisher 2021), but from the point of view of research on the circulation of visual motifs. In order to outline a possible epistemic agency of what I would like to consider as an interface of “visual study” (Brenez, 2009), some concrete outputs of the video selection processes operated by the platform will be confronted with the conception of a “heuristic montage” (Didi-Huberman 2009/2010/2011, following Warburg’s atlas method) as well as with Chris Marker’s and Harun Farocki’s related practices of the synthetic montage of (dis)continuity.